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It gives me great delight to be working with you and for you as your new president. What a great honor it is to take an active role in the transformation of IPS to meet the challenges of the future.

Our challenge as planetarians is to develop the planetarium to take a leading role in scientific and educational communities. Imagine a future when planetarium theaters are required and are always funded and never closed except to build a new one.
Our challenge as IPS is to equip you to do your job successfully.

The vehicle to fulfill our role is through Vision 2020. The direction of Vision 2020 was developed by and for you through the IPS SWOT survey, which many of you completed. We are grateful for your participation.

You pointed out our weaknesses, and strengths, with suggestions for a globally-productive future for our organization. The Vision 2020 Team, the officers and committees are operating at a rapid pace to provide the essential programs, papers, research and conferences that will give you the tools, knowledge and skills to perform your jobs exceedingly well.

By the time you read this message, my fellow awesome officers, Thomas Kraupe, Lee Ann Hennig, Shawn Laatsch, Ann Bragg, and our fearless Vision 2020 leader, Jon Elvert, will have met at my house on Florida’s Space Coast to work out the details of our ongoing projects. I will report the results of that meeting in the next issue of Planetarian.

In the meantime, you can get an idea of the issues we are facing in Jon’s update that follows on this page.

Additionally, the officers and I are working with Maciej Ligowski and Monika Malinowska of the Copernicus Science Centre on IPS 2016 in Warsaw, Poland. We are thrilled with Maciej’s and Monica’s plans for an extraordinary and enriching conference.

I think you will agree, after reading their report in this issue, that IPS 2016 will be an essential conference for your development as a planetarian. You won’t want to miss it.
If you feel the call to contribute your skills, ideas, and time to our great cause, we welcome you with open arms. Join a committee or Council, run for office, assist in a project, host a conference. Our success will be the result of exciting collaboration among dedicated and knowledgeable planetarians.